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ave preta mística mystical black bird

Tadáskía. ave preta mística mystical black bird. 2022

Pencil, colored pencil, oil pastel, and spray paint on torn paper, sixty-one sheets, 29 sheets (drawings in color), each approx.: 25 11/16 × 19 11/16" (65.2 × 50 cm)
32 sheets (text), each approx.: 23 3/8 × 16 9/16" (59.4 × 42 cm). Fund for the Twenty-First Century. © 2026 Tadáskía

Artist, Tadáskía: My name is Tadáskía, I was born in ‘93 and grew up in Santíssimo, on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro.

Drawing and writing are old interests of mine. I've been drawing since I was very little, on the floors of my house, on the doors and walls. Then, when I was 11 or 12 years old, I was hospitalized. From then on, I started writing constantly. Writing became my way of trying to tell the world what I felt most hidden.

In 2022, I went through some existential challenges. At the same time, I had my first opportunity to cross the Atlantic. When I arrived in Barcelona, I stayed in a square called Ocellets which, in Catalan, means little birds. The ave preta mística—mystical black bird—came to me. It invited me to imagine not only individual liberation but also shared liberation.

I started making ave preta mística mystical black bird initially through drawing freely, and that's how the story began to emerge. I shuffled the first drawings with the last ones, so the first pages you see are not necessarily the ones I made first. The poetic texts came later. The drawing doesn’t explain the text, in the same way that the text doesn’t explain the drawing.

I realized that flight doesn't just happen in the physical world. A mystical black bird can fly to hidden dimensions singing freely within and outside of our known time.